Drew McAllister on 2009-08-24
so, part of the adoption process may be that the introduction of a tool must be preceded by a discussion of pedagogy and what the tool can bring to that discussion
This link has been bookmarked by 132 people . It was first bookmarked on 16 Nov 2008, by Cindy Kendall.
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As such, educators over the years have attempted to keep the use of tools to a minimum, and as invisible as possible, and to focus on the teaching.
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To use a PLE will be essentially to immerse oneself in the flow of communications that constitutes a community of practice in some discipline or domain on the internet.
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To become educated in a discipline is to learn the habits, patterns, ways of thinking and ways of thinking characteristic of that discipline
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In both of these we are seeing aspects of the same phenomenon. To learn is not to acquire or to accumulate, but rather, to develop or to grow. The process of learning is a process of becoming, a process of developing one’s own self.
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On the other hand, online learning offers an inexpensive alternative – but only if it is deployed using less labour-intensive practices. Simply replicating the offline experience online does not save money; rather, we see reports that it becomes more expensive. Online learning, if it is to offer economic advantage, must be based on the idea that learners are able to provide for their own learning, using both resources provided by educators, and by assisting each other through collaborative networks.
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Consequently, the bookmark as public performance and record becomes one of its primary functions.
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A determined population of ambitious, talented and self-sufficient students can educate themselves, creating their own community, their own professions, their own future. We are seeing this unfold before our eyes, if we would only look.
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This will be the last generation in which education is the practice of authority, and the first where it becomes, as has always been intended by educators, an act of liberty.
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25 Mar 09
Fernando GonzalezInteresante ensayo sobre las perspectivas del elearning
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Alex Hernandez on 2009-02-09
Wrapper interacts with learner information / context
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In the world of digital content, too, the concept of 'fitting together' proved to be more complex that a mere plugging of one bit of content into another. It became clear that the learning management system would need to be able to exchange information with the learning object – to send to the object, for example, the student's name or grade, and to retrieve from the object, for example, test or quiz results. In the Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM) this was defined by means of what was called a 'wrapper' - some computer code that accompanied the object and facilitated this interaction. In practice, interactions tended to be specific to the system the learning object was defined for, so the objects, while technically SCORM-compliant, could not always be reused on other systems.
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What we have seen of web technology as a whole suggests that this is the course that will be taken. A single metadata file – a Dublin Core resource description, for example – now links to external vocabularies, rights declarations, and other metadata. Moreover, metadata created through use, sometimes called attention metadata, is now being merged with bibliographic metadata. And global search sites, such as Google, use their own internally created contextual metadata (such as link information) to organize search results.
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The development of new technology continues to have an impact on learning.
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access to bandwidth continues to improve
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As a result of the use of multiple processors, computers themselves are becoming what might be called ‘platform neutral’. Computer programs are being designed to run in ‘virtual machines’ which can be carried from one hardware platform to another without adaptation.
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Virtualization will occupy increasing attention in the future.
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The combination of ubiquitous broadband and the portable operating system will result in the widespread popularity of what is currently being called ‘cloud computing’. The idea is that your computer, as a set of data files, is stored online. As such, it may be access from any hardware environment, including mobile or portable devices. Consequently a person will access their single computing environment from different devices while at home, on the road or in the office. This computer will, in turn, access data and applications provided by remote online services.
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Storage is today widely available and relatively inexpensive.
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Indeed, it is arguable that we have already reached the upper limit of the large single-system software environment. A report from Gartner Consulting, for example, suggests that Windows Vista is collapsing under its own weight.
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Microsoft needs to virtualize Windows, to create versions tailored to different devices, simplifying the operating system providing a similar user experience across a wide range of products.
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Thomas LaigleUn excellent article de synthèse de Stephen Downes sur l'évolution de l'apprentissage en ligne et de ses tendances. En anglais...
e-learning connectivisme environnement d'apprentissage tice éducation ingénierie pédagogique
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Bandwidth is in the process of becoming ubiquitous, and though we may complain about the price, it is already, relatively speaking, cheap.
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Thomas Laigle on 2009-01-07
Situation in 3D world countries is not so good, but great improvements are awaited... cf Google's project to supply internet connection to Africa.
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Each person will have what may be thought of as a ‘profile’ of their own art, music and other media, which they have created themselves or with friends, along with records of their activities in various games and simulations
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Thomas Laigle on 2009-01-07
i.e. a personal learning (and playing, sharing, socializing...) environnement
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Learning materials are now available online as well. Probably the most representative (and most saturated) market is the language learning market, where providers market audio and video clips, flash cards and memory aids, study guides, and much more.
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Thomas Laigle on 2009-01-07
Although quality content is still scarce... most of these platforms focus on (sometimes useful) tools. User generated content doesn't work so good, probably because it takes time and high level skills to create language courses...
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Though there are different types of games, including quiz-games and branching games, the sort of games I felt most appropriate to educational use were learning environments such as were to be found in games like Sim City or Sim Earth. These games, now known as ‘spreadsheet games’, involve the creation of a large body of interacting data sets. Players manipulate both data sets and interactions, and resulting data states create the gameplay.
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Thomas Laigle on 2009-01-07
The best educational games for language learning are the games you can't play in your own language. But are kids willing to play to their favorite games in a foreign language if they don't have to ?
Online (massive) multiplayer games can be nice too, although english is proeminent and written language often... well... specific.
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In time, the learning management systems deployed by educational institutions will evolve into educational delivery systems usable by personal learning environments. They will, in essence, be the ‘remote resource’ accessed from a given context. Educational delivery systems will recognize the identity of the student making the request and will coordinate with other online applications (which may include commercial brokers, open resource repositories, or additional student records) to facilitate the student’s learning activity.
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Thomas Laigle on 2009-01-09
educational delivery systems = a filtering/connecting hub between student and resources/people ?
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However, institutions are beginning to learn to prepare content for distribution through remote systems, such as the provision of lectures for delivery through iTunes University. Such systems will evolve over time into a mature system of open content distribution, facilitated through open access mandates, repository and other server software, and content and interaction standards.
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Today, as noted above, we tend to think of such resources as static and bibliographical, like books in a library, where contents are ‘published’ and then ‘stored’. This view is evident in much of the discussion that surrounds learning technology today. We think of work as being stored in a research repository, indexed and archived, in such a way that we can search for them, typically through a catalogue (or metadata) system, and retrieve them. (Barker, 2007) The major concerns of educators in this environment are things like persistence and provenance, copyright and reproduction. (Jantz & Giarlo, 2005)
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In the networked learning environment, however, learning resources are best thought of not as content objects about a discipline that are retrieved and studied, but rather as words in a multimedia vocabulary that is used by students and teachers in an ongoing conversation within a discipline to engage in projects and activities. (Downes, The New Literacy, 2002) Content and learning resources, rather than being thought of as static objects, ought to be thought of as a dynamic flow. They are more like water or electricity and they are like books and artifacts.
The technology of learning – and of the web generally – is evolving to accommodate flow. -
Most educators, and most educational institutions, have not yet embraced the idea of flow and syndication in learning. They will – reluctantly – because it provides the learner with the means to manage and control his or her learning. They can keep unwanted content to a minimum (and this includes unwanted content from an institution). And they can manage many more sources – or content streams – using feed reader technology.
RSS and related specifications will be one of the primary ways Personal Learning Environments connect with remote systems. To use a PLE will be essentially to immerse oneself in the flow of communications that constitutes a community of practice in some discipline or domain on the internet. -
When people think of personalized online learning, they frequently think of adaptive systems, learning programs powered by artificial intelligences that test a student’s competence, formulate customized lesson plans based on those pre-tests, and then measure a student’s performance though a series of online activities. (Boticario & Santos, 2007)
While people will no doubt pursue solo learning activities (just as they, by themselves, read books today) this will not constitute the core of the learning experience in the future (just as reading books does not constitute the core of learning today). -
In the end, what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities. (Syverson & Slatin, 2006)These will include not only the results from games and other competitions with other people and with simulators, but also their creative work, their multimedia projects, their interactions with other people in ongoing or ad hoc projects, and the myriad details we consider when we consider whether or not a person is well educated.
Though there will continue to be ‘degrees’, these will be based on a mechanism of evaluation and recognition, rather than a lockstep marching through a prepared curriculum. And educational institutions will not have a monopoly on such evaluations (though the more prestigious ones will recognize the value of aggregating and assessing evaluations from other sources). -
Earning a degree will, in such a world, resemble less a series of tests and hurdles, and will come to resemble more a process of making a name for oneself in a community. The recommendation of one person by another as a peer will, in the end, become the standard of educational value, not the grade or degree.
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but online learning is at heart a form of distance learning, and therefore offers as one of its primary advantages a form of time and place independence for the learner. Cloud computing and mobile computing will offer these forms of independence. They can, indeed, be thought of as offering a third, equally important, form of independence: device independence.
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Time Independence
We are well used to the idea that students, whether working in traditional online courses or independently through informal learning, will access their materials and activities at any time of the day. They can work any day of the week, or if they are employed in agriculture or some other seasonal occupation, any time of the year. -
Place Independence
Online learning stiff suffers from the misperception that it is about having students sit in front of their computer screen for extended periods of time. As a consequence, the idea that online learning might foster independence of place has been missing in much of the discussion of the field. -
That said, much of the learning that is happening in today’s schools is beginning to resemble the sort of learning that one might expect in a connected environment. Student-centered methodologies are becoming widely accepted in many nations. In particular, constructivist pedagogies are being implemented in some e-learning technology, such as Moodle, and adopted by some systems, such as in the province of Quebec, Canada.
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The convergence of digital life with in-person life is not, therefore, a mere addition of a digital dimension to the in-person life we lead today. It transforms and reshapes that life, removing from it elements that could be done more efficiently (or more pleasantly) in a digital environment, and opening up opportunities for new and more types of in-person activities.
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Learning Communities
Education is not merely the acquisition of new information and skills. To become educated in a discipline is to learn the habits, patterns, ways of thinking and ways of thinking characteristic of that discipline. Consequently, learning is a social activity, wherein we immerse ourselves into what Etienne Wenger called a community of practice, learn what Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge, and be able to complete, as Thomas Kuhn famously summarized, the problems at the end of the chapter. -
Interest-Based Communities
Today we would use the label ‘communities of practice’ to label ‘interest-based communities’, or as I also called them, ‘topic-based communities’. -
Wenger’s characterization was informative. Communities would form around a topic of interest – the ‘domain’. They would engage in community activities – “members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information.” And they would share a practice – a repertoire of resources, a vocabulary, common stories, common methodologies, common ways of approaching a problem.
Learning in the community of practice takes the form of what might be called ‘peer-to-peer professional development activities’. Rather than formalized learning, members help each other directly. -
peer-based communities are almost the polar opposite of interest-based communities. They are not based on some common interest; one member may be an artist while the other may be a scientist. In the first instance, they are created through proximity, being composed of people who live in the same neighborhood or who go to the same school. Over the longer term, we may say, they are just people who meet by happenstance, and find an affinity for each other.
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Given convergence, it was inevitable that these communities would also establish themselves online. Indeed, the secret to the rise of Facebook, which rose to prominence in a short time, and which now has the most traffic of any site on the internet, is that it formed connections between friends based on their common origins and common schools
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It is probably a truism today (though there still remain exceptions to be observed online) that communities are grown rather than constructed, and that (therefore) they are owned (and managed) by their members rather than by some external agency. The desire for autonomy comes part and parcel with some of the perceived benefits of learning and growing in a community: safely, security, and privacy.
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The value of a community, however, and especially of a learning community, comes from the diversity in the community. Students gather around an instructor precisely because the instructor has knowledge, beliefs and opinions that the students don’t share. They gather around each other because they each have unique experiences. Fistering a learning community is as much a matter of drawing on the differences as it is a matter of underlining the similarities.
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What will work best online, therefore, will not be a process of community building, but rather, a process of community enabling. The transition in community is therefore analogous, and parallel, to the transition in content. Just as people no longer need publishers to create content for them, they no longer need organizers to create community. Rather, just as, with access to powerful content-creation tools, they can create their own content, in the same way, with powerful community-building tools, they can create their own communities.
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Learners will create their own communities, their own environments. At most, the educator needs to ensure that the tools are there for students to use, and that the channels of communication, from student to student, from community to community, are open.
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To learn is not to acquire or to accumulate, but rather, to develop or to grow. The process of learning is a process of becoming, a process of developing one’s own self.
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The Triad
The idea of the triad model is that in any given learning situation, there are three major participants: the student, the instructor, and a local coach or facilitator. The idea was that the instructor would be online, a member of the interest-based learning community, while the coach or facilitator would be more a member of the peer-based community. -
The Divergence of Learning and Testing
It hasn’t happened yet in any large scale and formal way, but it is probably inevitable that the domains of ‘learning’ and ‘testing’ will separate. In the future it may even be thought of as quaint that those responsible for the fostering of learning were also those responsible for evaluating whether or not learning actually happened. -
n traditional learning there is slow acceptance that people may be tested without first having been taught. Colleges and universities are investigating ‘PLAR’ (Prior Learning And Recognition) systems. People who are in some way able to demonstrate their ability – through a portfolio system, for example, are able to circumvent the need for testing altogether.
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Modularity
A History of Modularity
When the concept of the 'learning object' was proposed, a large part of the idea was based on the idea that these small chunks of content would be fitted together to form larger entities. "Like Legos," said some proponents, describing the way the objects would use a universal interface to fir together. -
As David Wiley noted after a few years of practice with learning objects, other analogies might be more appropriate - that of the atom, for example, where some parts may fit some other parts, but not all parts fit all other parts.
In the years that have passed, specifications, such as Content Packaging and Simple Sequencing, were designed to facilitate the creation of larger entities out of smaller entities. But the idea of making large content entities out of smaller and reusable content entities began to be challenged. In 'the reusability paradox', Wiley questioned the idea. For content to be usable, he argued, it must be very specific to a context. But if context is very specific to a context, it is not reusable.
It is too early to suggest that the idea of reusable modular content is incorrect, if indeed it ever was incorrect. But Wiley's observations, along with a deeper look at the analogy from mechanical parts, shows that reuse is rather more complex than the mere connection of digital objects together. -
Meanwhile, more or less public archives sprang up on the open internet, sites such as the internet Archive, Flickr, YouTube and box.net.
The educational community, however, saw the repository as something that would be housed and managed locally. -
Proponents of this model argued that local storage was necessary to ensure reliable access, consistency and persistence.
This is an argument that makes sense when reusable content is being used to construct static and asynchronous courses. As the use of learning resources becomes more dynamic, however, the extra steps required in order to obtain and store locally external content become more onerous. In the long run, a mixture of approaches will be used. Material will be sourced externally – it won’t make any sense to restrict one’s search to a local library – and insofar as local copies are created, this will be done automatically. -
As I later argued in my paper Resource Profiles, LOM should not attempt to be all things to all people, and should focus solely on the educational properties of a resource. Moreover, I argued, these educational properties are not identifiable a priori in the resource itself, but rather, are defined over time through use. Consequently, instead of designing LOM as though it were a bibliographic record – which was the practice of the educational technology community – LOM should be integrated with and used with other specifications and standards, forming part of a larger, and more dynamic, resource profile.
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What we have seen of web technology as a whole suggests that this is the course that will be taken. A single metadata file – a Dublin Core resource description, for example – now links to external vocabularies, rights declarations, and other metadata. Moreover, metadata created through use, sometimes called attention metadata, is now being merged with bibliographic metadata. And global search sites, such as Google, use their own internally created contextual metadata (such as link information) to organize search results.
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While the traditional conception of learning objects was that designers or instructors would assemble smaller chunks of content into coherent presentations of learning material, this is rather the idea that the management of re-use would be placed directly into the learner’s hands, so that reuse could occur, not simply within a course content, but in any context where re-use makes sense.
In this way, the reuse of learning resources is consistent with the sort of reuse we see happening elsewhere on the internet. Rather than being structured to form larger wholes, individual bits of content are being remixed and repurposed to form new content objects, and these content objects are being used in what amounts to a rich multi-media based conversation. From the perspective of the learner, the learning resource is like a YouTube video or a Flickr image or any other type of content: something to be shared with friends and used to express ideas and points of view.
None of the metaphors, such as Legos or atoms, describe this version of modularity appropriately. I once used the metaphor of objects in an environment – like a horse and a palm tree – to describe modularity. Objects are not designed for each other, nor do they fit together in any particular way – they coexist in the same space, and each perceives the other in its own way. They share, if you will, the same information space – the palm tree reflects light waves, and the horse sees them. The objects function autonomously, connected, interacting, but not joined. -
publishers sought greater control over distribution, seeking to license, rather than sell, content and software.
This prevented instructors from replicating online practices common in the typical classroom. No longer could newspaper clippings, articles or textbook chapters be distributed as handouts. No longer could video clips be shown or audio recordings be played to the class. The digitization of academic content was, at every turn, challenged by publishers.
In like manner, the use of educational software became a complex and expensive proposition for educational institutions. The cost of educational software rose, mergers and lawsuits limited competition, and customers were locked in to existing vendors by proprietary technology and the cost of conversion. -
The argument in favour of strong intellectual property protection is that it fosters innovation. But our experiences over the last ten years show the paucity of such claims. The areas in which innovation has been fastest have been areas in which no effective patents held sway – HTML, CSS and Javascript, content management and syndication.
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While court cases, protests and defiance have garnered the headlines, the most overwhelmingly popular response to proprietary content and technology has been the fostering and creation of free and open alternatives.
Free and open source software, as well as free and open content, have both been made possible through the development of licenses prohibiting the enclosure of such work in proprietary media. These licenses have been defended successfully in court. -
A growing tide of opinion has begun to support the Open Access movement, driven largely by the argument that scientific research and educational content produced through government investments ought to be freely available.
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Even if commercial publishers win strong copy protections from policy makers and technology companies, the trend toward free and open content will overwhelm them. As it stands, content producers are beginning to understand that it is better to allow their content to circulate freely, without restriction. This is because such content offers unequaled marketing and promotional opportunities, especially for new and not well recognized acts. Additionally, content syndication agencies, such as YouTube, are finding ways to recognize commercial content and allocate advertising revenue to the owners.
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What should be understood, however, is that the bulk of educational content online will be free to access and reuse. It will be created by governments, foundations, companies and individuals, and will be permitted to freely circulate, used by students and instructors worldwide to support their own learning.
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As with the market in open source software (and perhaps even more so) the commercial presence will be seen most of all through the provision of services. There are two major criteria for any educational good to obtain financial return in the marketplace: first, it cannot be something that can be digitally duplicated, for then the effective value per unit approaches zero; and second, it cannot be something that the users of that good or service could easily produce for themselves, for once again, the effective value per unit approaches zero.
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Today, much of the value derived from the learning marketplace is based on an artificially imposed scarcity – a scarcity of seats in classrooms, a scarcity of credentialing agencies, and a scarcity of educational publications, for example. These scarcities will disappear as governments prefer to fund education directly, and at cost, rather than support such business models.
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But in general, educational enterprises will have to be more creative in finding opportunities. Content providers will discover there are much larger markets to be had when they help people create their own content. This will be the basis for the educational marketplace of the future. In general, helping people provide for themselves – helping them, in other words, save time and money – will provide the best opportunities. Selling people cameras instead of pictures, for example. Course content creation kits instead of courses.
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the major shift in instructional technology will be from systems centered on the educational institution to systems centered on the individual learner.
As a result, rather than the employment of a single system to accomplish all educational tasks, both instructors and learners will use a variety of different tools in combination with each other. These tools, as described above, will communicate with each other, and will support the acquisition and creation of learning content, as well as activities such as games or real-time collaboration. -
In a sense, the platform of the future will do exactly the job assigned to the instructional management system of the past: “an instructional management system is the backbone motherboard into which all educational components are plugged.” This analogy remains apt today. However, with a proliferation of platforms, a central question emerges: who manages the platform?
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Tracking and reporting are the major functions required of a learning management system today (and main reasons institutions want to keep using them). No matter what device a student is using, no matter where they access an online course, the LMS can report on what they have viewed (and reviewed), keep track of test scores and upload grades, and provide a secure, monitored location for in-class conversation and collaboration.
Future learning technology will need to support such functions, at least to some degree. The recognition of learning, whether by institutional certification, third-part testing, or community reputation, is to a significant degree a matter of reporting activities and achievement. -
The popularity of social networks in recent years is only partially due to the desire to connect with others; it is also driven by a desire to shut out unwanted people and content.
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As people become increasingly frustrated with unwanted content, the internet will resemble less a broadcast medium and more a person-to-person communications medium.
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The two schools of thought identified in my earlier paper can still be seen today. On the one hand, there is a body of opinion that states that online learning is more expensive than traditional learning, that the average online course costs thousands of dollars to produce, and that specialized systems, such as simulations, even more so. And there is the other voice that points to the economics of reuse and suggests that online learning, in the long run, will save money.
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Where online learning involves the development of courses, simulations, and other advanced software, development costs are very high.
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On the other hand, if the work done to develop an online course serves merely to duplicate an in-person course already available to students, the expense seems questionable. Replicating classroom conditions is not the cheapest way to conduct learning online, and we become more experienced with the internet, alternatives emerge. A model of learning that puts much of the organization into the hand of students – such as is the case with the Massive Open Online Course being taught by George Siemens and myself – may prove to be much more cost-efficient.
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Automation does not mean the end of teaching careers, though. What automation allows is (as I said ten years ago) a ‘deep personalization’ of learning. Automation allows us to more easily create and present content, to more easily form groups and collaborate, to more easily give tests and take surveys.
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EdTech RoundUpThe Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On
An MS-Word version of this essay is available at http://www.downes.ca/files/future2008.doc
In the summer of 1998, over two frantic weeks in July, I wrote an essay titled The Future of Online Learning. (Downes, 1998) At the time, I was working as a distance education and new media design specialist at Assiniboine Community College, and I wrote the essay to defend the work I was doing at the time. “We want a plan,” said my managers, and so I outlined the future as I thought it would – and should – unfold.future technology learning education Downes trends connectivism e-learning ETRweekly10
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ghazala ansaria blog by Stephen Downes on his take on the future of online learning
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Carol ArcoEssay on today's learning compared to 10 years ago.
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António TeixeiraUm ensaio de Stephen Downes sobre o futuro do elearning.
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Chris DukeIn this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998, and with the benefit of ten year’s experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not an attempt to vindicate the previous paper – time has done that – but to carry on in the same spirit, and to push that vision ten years deeper into the future.
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Lynne JonesIn this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998, and with the benefit of ten year’s experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not an attempt to vindicate the previous paper – time
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Consequently a person will access their single computing environment from different devices while at home, on the road or in the office. This computer will, in turn, access data and applications provided by remote online services.
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Zsolt KulcsárIn the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. I have found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been some movement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essentially correct. This gives me confidence in my understanding of those forces and trends that are moving education today.
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Fernando SSegunda versión, diez años después del aprendizaje online para ver su futuro
learning education future technology connectivism downes e-learning trends
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Maru del Campoto check. Dolores rec
education technology teaching connectivism Computer onlinelearning pedagogy change innovation stephendownes frommydelicious
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John Evanseless technologies created an essentially mobile internet, with Wi-Max, a long-range broadband wireless internet standard, poise
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Paul Beaufait"an epic, must-read article" according to Brian Lamb (A social layer for DSpace? 2008.11.19
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/049355.php)learning future connectivism education technology Downes trends online
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While we want to provide personalized attention, especially to submitted work, testing and grading, learning is still heavily dependent on the teacher. But because the teacher in turn is responsible for assembling, and often presenting, the materials to be learned, customization and personalization have not been practical. So we have adopted a model where small groups of people form a cohort, thus allowing the teacher to present the same material to more than one person at a time, while offering individualized interaction and assessment.
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Though networks have always existed, modern communications technologies highlight their existence and given them a new robustness. Networks are distinct from groups in that they preserve individual autonomy and promote diversity of belief, purpose and methodology. In a network, however, people do not act as disassociated individuals, but rather, cooperate in a series of exchanges that can produce, not merely individual goods, but also social goods.
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In the case of informal learning, however, the structure is much looser. People pursue their own objectives in their own way, while at the same time initiating and sustaining an ongoing dialogue with others pursuing similar objectives. Learning and discussion is not structured, but rather, is determined by the needs and interests of the participants.
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it is not clear that an outcomes driven system is what students require; many valuable skills and aptitudes – art appreciation, for example – are not identifiable as an outcome. This becomes evident when we consider how learning is to be measured. In traditional learning, success is achieved not merely by passing the test but in some way being recognized as having achieved expertise. A test-only system is a coarse system of measurement for a complex achievement.
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The products of our conversations are as concrete as test scores and grades. (Ryan, 2007) But, as the result of a complex and interactive process, they are much more complex, allowing not only for the measurement of learning, but also for the recognition of learning. As it becomes easier to simply see what a student can accomplish, the idea of a coarse-grained proxy, such as grades, will fade to the background.
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Most educators, and most educational institutions, have not yet embraced the idea of flow and syndication in learning. They will – reluctantly – because it provides the learner with the means to manage and control his or her learning. They can keep unwanted content to a minimum (and this includes unwanted content from an institution). And they can manage many more sources – or content streams – using feed reader technology.
RSS and related specifications will be one of the primary ways Personal Learning Environments connect with remote systems. To use a PLE will be essentially to immerse oneself in the flow of communications that constitutes a community of practice in some discipline or domain on the internet. -
In the end, what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities. (Syverson & Slatin, 2006)
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place independence means that real learning will occur in real environments, with the contributions of the students not being some artifice designed strictly for practice, but an actual contribution to the business or enterprise in question.
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As it becomes more and more possible to teach oneself online, and even to demonstrate one’s achievement through productive membership in a community of practice, there will be greater demand for a formalized system of recognition, a way for people to demonstrate their competence in an area without having to go through a formal program of study in the area.
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the major shift in instructional technology will be from systems centered on the educational institution to systems centered on the individual learner.
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rather than the employment of a single system to accomplish all educational tasks, both instructors and learners will use a variety of different tools in combination with each other.
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Automation allows us to more easily create and present content, to more easily form groups and collaborate, to more easily give tests and take surveys. This frees instructors to perform tasks that have been traditionally more difficult and time consuming – to relate to students on a personal basis, to offer coaching and moral support, to learn about and analyze a student’s inclinations and understandings.
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21 Nov 08
Will RichardsonThough networks have always existed, modern communications technologies highlight their existence and given them a new robustness. Networks are distinct from groups in that they preserve individual autonomy and promote diversity of belief, purpose and met
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Will StewartIn the summer of 1998, over two frantic weeks in July, I wrote an essay titled The Future of Online Learning. (Downes, 1998) At the time, I was working as a distance education and new media design specialist at Assiniboine Community College, and I wrote the essay to defend the work I was doing at the time. “We want a plan,” said my managers, and so I outlined the future as I thought it would – and should – unfold.
In the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. I have found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been some movement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essentially correct. This gives me confidence in my understanding of those forces and trends that are moving education today.-
What we have begun to notice with online learning, however, is a decreasing emphasis on this formal style of learning, and an increasing emphasis on what has come to be called informal learning. (Chivers, 2006) In the case of informal learning, students are not constrained by the limits of the classroom model. They can set their own curriculum and proceed at their own pace. (Moore, 1986) Learning can thus be based on a student’s individual needs, rather than as predefined in a formal class, and based on a student’s schedule, rather than that set by the institution.
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20 Nov 08
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19 Nov 08
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J BlackIn the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. I have found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been some movement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essent
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Jeff UtechtIn this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998, and with the benefit of ten year’s experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not an attempt to vindicate the previous paper – time has done that – but to carry on in the same spirit, and to push that vision ten years deeper into the future.
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Underlying the transition from formal, structured learning to more informal and more unstructured learning is not simply a technological change but also a social change
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pursue their own objectives in their own way
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learning systems are essentially content delivery systems
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Rhondda PowlingA very thorough article about The Future of Online Learning.
web2.0 Education technology blog teaching learning research e-learning article learning2.0 21stcenturyskills stephendownes
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18 Nov 08
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17 Nov 08
paul loweThe Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On
An MS-Word version of this essay is available at http://www.downes.ca/files/future2008.doc
In the summer of 1998, over two frantic weeks in July, I wrote an essay titled The Future of Online Learning. (Downes, 1998) At the time, I was working as a distance education and new media design specialist at Assiniboine Community College, and I wrote the essay to defend the work I was doing at the time. “We want a plan,” said my managers, and so I outlined the future as I thought it would – and should – unfold.
In the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. I have found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been some movement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essentially correct. This gives me confidence in my understanding of those forces and trends that are moving education today.
In this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998, and with the benefit of ten year’s experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not an attempt to vindicate the previous paper – time has done that – but to carry on in the same spirit, and to push that vision ten years deeper into the future.connectivism future Downes learning trends technology education e_learning
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The second is the concept of ‘Web 2.0’ that has recently swept the internet. (O'Reilly, 2005) Web 2.0 is actually a cluster of technologies that combine to allow web sites to become interactive.
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Networks are distinct from groups in that they preserve individual autonomy and promote diversity of belief, purpose and methodology. In a network, however, people do not act as disassociated individuals, but rather, cooperate in a series of exchanges that can produce, not merely individual goods, but also social goods.
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The ‘personal learning environment’ (PLE) is a collection of concepts intended to express this idea. (Liber, 2006) The PLE is not an application, but rather, a description of the process of learning in situ from a variety of courses and according to one’s personal, context-situated, needs. The process, simply, is that learners will be presented with learning resources according to their interests, aptitudes, educational levels, and other factors (including employer factor and social factors) while they are in the process of working at their job, engaging in a hobby, or playing a game.
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The personal learning environment, however, is not based on the principle of access to resources. It should more accurately be viewed as a mechanism to interact with multiple services. (Milligan, 2006) The personal learning environment is more of a conferencing tool than it is a content tool. The focus of a personal learning environment is more on creation and communication than it is consumption and completion. It is best to think of the interfaces facilitated by a personal learning environment as ways to create and manipulate content, as applications rather than resources.
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Connectivism
The educational institution is unlikely to disappear, but it is unlikely also to remain the sole locus of student learning. Educational institutions will need more and more to think of themselves as part of a larger system, and as their offerings as entities that will become a part of, and interact with, the larger environment. Consider, for example, the photo editor that connects to Flickr, described above. Now imagine what an art appreciation resource would look like, how it would interact with Flickr photos. (Unattributed, 2006) -
This is the fundamental understanding behind a learning theory developed to describe learning in networks, connectivism. (Siemens, 2004) The theory proposes that knowledge is contained, not merely in the bits of information transmitted to and fro as content and creations, but in the way these contents, and the people that create them, link together. Just as the activation of the pixels on a television screen form an image of a person, so also the bits of information we create and we consume form patterns constituting the basis of our knowledge, and learning is consequently the training our own individualized neural networks – our brains – to recognize these patterns.
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The purpose of educational institutions, therefore, is not merely to create and distribute learning opportunities and resources, but also to facilitate a student’s participation in a learning environment
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Public Stiky Notes
Online (massive) multiplayer games can be nice too, although english is proeminent and written language often... well... specific.
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